The Book of Enoch’s Anachronism: Fallen Angels Naming Mount Hermon Before the Flood
Enoch Chapter 6:4-6: "...'Let us all swear an oath, and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing.' Then sware they all together and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. And they were in all two hundred; who descended ⌈in the days ⌉ of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it."
The Book of Enoch claims that about 200 fallen angels descended on a mountain before the Flood and named it “Mount Hermon.” The text even says the mountain was called Hermon because of the oath they swore there. However, this claim contains a serious historical and biblical error.
Mount Hermon, as a name and significant landmark, is known only from post-Flood history—long after the time of Jared mentioned in Genesis and the Book of Enoch. The Bible and historical records clearly show that the mountain’s name and religious importance, including its association with Baal worship (Baal-Hermon), came long after the Flood, during the times of Israel and surrounding nations (Deuteronomy 3:8-9, Judges 3:3, 1st Chronicles 5:23). In fact, the mountain had other names before it was ever called Mount Hermon, so one can't say survivors of the flood named it Mount Hermon in remembrance of the old mountain before the flood, which is likely what happened to the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.
Additionally, it would be impossible for pre-Flood people or angels to name a pre-flood mountain, only for the same mountain to keep the same location and name unchanged after the Flood completely reshaped the Earth’s geography. The Bible describes the Flood as a global catastrophe that raised mountains and sank valleys (Psalm 104:8-9), suggesting the pre-Flood landscape was radically altered.
The Book of Enoch’s claim makes no sense historically or biblically. It uses post-Flood place names and religious concepts anachronistically—superimposing later history onto a time before the Flood. This kind of mistake highlights how unreliable the Book of Enoch is as a historical or spiritual source that was supposedly written by pre-flood Enoch.
The same anachronism applies to its mention of Mount Sinai, another landmark better known from post-Flood times. These errors confirm that the Book of Enoch was not written by the real Enoch from Genesis, but by later authors unfamiliar with or ignoring biblical history and using names familiar to them during their time.
Let's touch on another issue that some may bring up about this topic. While both the Bible and the Book of Enoch contain instances that critics identify as anachronisms, the two function very differently. In the Bible, later editorial updates to language and place names (such as calling a city by the name it had in the author’s own time) are widely recognized as narrative conventions meant to help readers identify locations, not as claims that these names existed at the time of the events. By contrast, the Book of Enoch attributes to pre-flood angels the act of naming Mount Hermon, a mountain which not only acquired that name centuries later in historical usage but also would not have existed in the same recognizable form because of the catastrophic flood. This makes Enoch’s reference a substantive historical error rather than a conventional editorial update, highlighting a sharp difference in credibility between biblical anachronisms and those in Enoch.
In summary, the Book of Enoch’s story about fallen angels naming Mount Hermon before the Flood is inaccurate and shows its legendary and mythological nature. It wrongly mixes timelines and locations, making it an unreliable source compared to the Bible.
